German Patent Application DE 10 2012 213 007 A1 discusses a control system for a vehicle and a method for operating a control unit for controlling a vehicle component. As a client, a control unit sends a query to a vehicle server. The vehicle server forms a response in accordance with the query and sends the response to the control unit. The control unit controls the vehicle component based on the response.
Control of modern vehicles requires increasing processing of individual and sometimes user-specific data. These data may include, for example, the instantaneous position of the vehicle, a destination entered by a user, a trip route or the like. In addition, a user may also request, for example, position-based recommendations for so-called points of interest. These recommendations may include, for example, suggestions for certain businesses, restaurants, etc. In addition, based on a user's known habits, suitable suggestions for musical items, preferred radio stations or the like may also be selected by an entertainment system. By keeping logs and taking into account previous user inputs, conclusions may be drawn about user habits. Based on these conclusions, a corresponding system is able to deliver automatically optimized recommendations, which correspond to user habits with a high probability.
However, these pieces of information about user habits are sensitive personal data. It is not always desirable for these personal data to be accessible to third parties. For example, if one vehicle is used by several people, it is not always desirable for each individual person to be able to access the user habits of the other people or, if necessary, receive recommendations based on the user habits of the other people.
There is therefore a demand for processing of user-specific data, which will enable confidential processing of the user-specific data. In particular, there is a need for processing of user-specific data from a vehicle, which makes it possible to not make the user-specific data and the processing results obtained from them available to third parties.